Crime O'Clock

68%
Game Brain Score Based on 255 reviews
  • story
  • gameplay
  • graphics
Crime O'Clock Game Cover
Crime O'Clock offers puzzling mysteries and a wholly unique premise.
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Crime O'Clock is a point-and-click game where you, as a time detective, prevent crimes from happening in various eras. Investigate cases, uncover clues, and connect the dots to resolve hacking, murder, and theft crimes. As you solve cases, the map changes and new adventures are unlocked, ultimately unraveling a larger mystery that spans across centuries. Observe, deduce, and act before time runs out!

  • Mac OS
  • Nintendo Switch
  • PC
  • Windows
Genres & TagsPlay Modes

Reviews

68%
Audience ScoreBased on 255 reviews
story48 positive mentions
grinding9 negative mentions
  • The art style is charming and filled with details, making the scenes enjoyable to explore.
  • The time travel mechanic adds a unique twist to the hidden object genre, allowing players to track characters across different time ticks.
  • The game features a wealth of pop culture references and Easter eggs that enhance the overall experience.
  • The gameplay is overly linear and hand-holding, often removing the player's ability to explore or make decisions.
  • Mini-games are repetitive and simplistic, interrupting the flow of the main gameplay and often feeling tedious.
  • The pacing is slow due to excessive dialogue and animations, which can detract from the enjoyment of solving the mysteries.
  • story338 mentions

    The story in the game is a mixed bag, with many players finding it engaging yet overly guided and repetitive. While the concept of time travel and solving mysteries is intriguing, the execution often feels disjointed due to forced narrative shifts and tedious mini-games that interrupt the flow. Overall, the narrative has potential but suffers from predictability and a lack of player agency, leading to a frustrating experience for some.

    • “The basic concept of tracking a story through finding objects across time, solving mysteries by tracing them back to their source and finding ways to undo those temporal shifts, is genuinely engaging even with all the strong-arming.”
    • “Crime O'clock is, at its heart, genuinely interesting: an investigation/spot-the-object simulator with a story about time travel that allows you to see how one scene changes throughout a whole day, cleverly making the five investigation areas feel like fifty as you track down what suspects were doing before, during, and after their crimes.”
    • “The story is interesting, the narrator AI is funny (although a little too wordy sometimes for my personal tastes), and I love the hot & cold hint system.”
    • “Taking the freedom out of the story mode really made the game worse for me.”
    • “The main story was okay, but it was heavily railroaded.”
    • “The story itself was predictable but the gameplay repeated itself over and over and never added anything fun or new.”
  • gameplay110 mentions

    The gameplay of the game is a blend of hidden object mechanics and narrative-driven investigations, which some players find satisfying but often interrupted by repetitive mini-games and excessive dialogue. While the core gameplay loop is enjoyable, many reviewers express frustration with its handholdy nature and the lack of complexity, leading to a feeling of monotony over time. Overall, the game has potential with its innovative mechanics and appealing art style, but it suffers from pacing issues and a reliance on trivial challenges that detract from the overall experience.

    • “The gameplay loop is really strong and enjoyable.”
    • “Crime O'Clock offers a great time-traveling detective experience and shows what skilled developers can achieve while reinventing a classic mechanic.”
    • “The point-and-click gameplay is simple to understand, and there’s a solid hint system that will ensure fans never get frustrated when they simply cannot locate someone or something.”
    • “During your investigations, you are constantly interrupted by dialogues at each step, which becomes quite annoying after a couple of hours of gameplay.”
    • “In terms of negatives, the main storyline gets quite repetitive, as the core mechanic of just looking for things in the scenes is constantly interrupted by small mini-games.”
    • “The gameplay never changes outside of that, aside from adding a couple of gadgets that allow you to open crates and boxes or see inside buildings, but only certain ones.”
  • graphics40 mentions

    The game's graphics are praised for their charming art style, detailed character designs, and clever pop-culture references, creating an engaging visual experience reminiscent of "Where's Waldo." However, the black-and-white aesthetic has received criticism for adding unnecessary difficulty and obscuring clarity, detracting from the overall enjoyment. While the artwork is generally well-received, some players feel it could be improved to better support the gameplay.

    • “The art style is adorable with just enough detail that it's mesmerizing.”
    • “The game's presented primarily in black-and-white with each case adding a relevant splash of color, which was an interesting aesthetic helped by the charmingly cartoon character designs.”
    • “The artwork and character designs are terrific, lots of unique characters to find with great cel-shading to add depth despite everything being in black and white.”
    • “I have zero idea why this game wanted to do a black and white aesthetic, but I can assure you it does nothing to really help this game; if anything, it just adds artificial difficulty and makes the game far worse than it could be.”
    • “The black and white aesthetic can really send you in the wrong direction by not being clear what it is that you're looking at sometimes.”
    • “The art style and character design also does a disservice for you at multiple times.”
  • music28 mentions

    The game's music is generally praised for its pleasant soundtrack that complements the game's themes and eras, though it suffers from repetitiveness, especially during long conversations and on the main screen. While some players enjoy the incorporation of music into gameplay, others find the music mini-game frustrating and distracting. Overall, the music enhances the experience but could benefit from more variety and refinement.

    • “All in all, the game is very fun, the twist (while explained early on) still was very enjoyable, and of course the music in this game is amazing.”
    • “The soundtrack is awesome and I like the idea of incorporating story as long as it doesn't sacrifice the gameplay.”
    • “The soundtrack that is pleasant to the ears and matches the theme of the game and the eras.”
    • “You have to read long conversations with the same boring background music?”
    • “The fact that it shares the system with a music-based minigame makes having to listen to it that much more annoying.”
    • “The music mini-game is the worst.”
  • humor22 mentions

    The humor in the game is a mixed bag, with some players finding the quirky jokes and puns genuinely funny, while others feel the attempts at humor are forced and overly verbose. Many appreciate the cleverness of the minor stories and scenarios, but some criticize the excessive dialogue from the AI companion, which can detract from the gameplay experience. Overall, the humor resonates differently among players, with a notable divide between those who enjoy it and those who do not.

    • “It's a straight-up Where's Waldo, which is fun since the graphics are great and a lot of humor goes into some of these scenarios.”
    • “A very interesting story, with several intriguing cases tied together by a main story with several twists, and punctuated by some jokes and puns that I found very funny.”
    • “Apart from the main story, many funny (and occasionally quite dark and sad) minor stories are hidden within the lovingly drawn pictures.”
  • grinding9 mentions

    Players find the grinding aspect of the game to be excessively tedious, particularly in the later missions, which are longer and require full completion to retain progress. The repetitive gameplay loop and the need for walkthroughs to navigate certain levels contribute to a frustrating experience, leading some players to abandon the game altogether.

    • “To make things worse, the missions towards the end of the game are significantly longer, which means you have to complete them fully; otherwise, your progress is lost, and it gets even more tedious to play this game.”
    • “The game gets really tedious as soon as you're dealing with story or searching for anything other than a person (use a walkthrough for any level where you're just looking for shapes).”
    • “The tutorial level does this perfectly, but as the game goes on, everything gets more tedious.”
  • character development6 mentions

    Character development in the game is enhanced by its unique art style, featuring charming cartoon designs and effective cel-shading that adds depth, despite the predominantly black-and-white presentation. Players appreciate the variety of unique characters, although some feel that the art style occasionally detracts from the overall experience.

    • “The artwork and character designs are terrific, lots of unique characters to find with great cel-shading to add depth despite everything being in black and white.”
    • “The art style and character design also does a disservice for you at multiple times.”
    • “The game's presented primarily in black-and-white with each case adding a relevant splash of colour, which was an interesting aesthetic helped by the charmingly cartoon character designs.”
  • monetization2 mentions

    The monetization aspect of the game is not explicitly addressed in the provided text, which focuses more on the enjoyment of exploring maps and discovering hidden details. Therefore, no specific insights about monetization can be drawn from this summary.

  • stability2 mentions

    Overall, the game's stability is generally solid, with users reporting a bug-free experience. However, there are minor issues such as misplaced words in dialogue and formatting problems that cause text to extend off the screen.

    • “The game has been largely bug-free in my experience, with only a couple of misplaced words in Eve's dialogue and some minor formatting issues.”
    • “Overall, the stability of the game is impressive, with only a few minor dialogue and formatting hiccups that don't detract from the experience.”
    • “Despite a few minor issues with dialogue formatting, the game runs smoothly and is mostly free of bugs.”
Positive mentions (%)Positive
Neutral mentions (%)Neutral
Negative mentions (%)Negative

Critic Reviews

71% average critic score

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